Which Blog?
What’s a blog?
A blog, short for web log, is a software script that allows you to tell other people about your interests, your business, other peoples business, how-to guides, providing news, pretty much anything you want to write about really.
Blogs are great for letting your visitors know what you have been up to and for Internet Marketers they are a easy method of keeping visitors informed of the lastest developments and offering them ebooks and Internet Marketing Tools.
One of the best bits about running a blog is that they are web-based, meaning that you can post to your blog from anywhere that you can find an Internet connection, just login and type.
The two main players.
There are two main players in the blogging script world, Blogger and Wordpress.
Both of these scripts have their advantages and disadvantages, but in my mind one comes way out on top. But first let’s take a look at the both.
Blogger.com
Blogger was the first to create this kind of software and was originally owned by a small company in San Francisco called Pyra Labs. When blogging started to take off, the mighty Google got interested and bought Pyra Labs. So now Google owns Blogger.
To start a Blogger blog, all you need to do is go to Blogger.com, create a free account, give your blog a name, select a theme (the look of your blog) and away you go.
When you first create a Blogger blog, and have signed in you are shown what is called the Dashboard. Here you will see the name you gave your blog and underneath links to create a new post, Manager you posts, change the settings and a layout option, that allows you to change the look of your blog.
When you select any of these options you are taken to a screen with tabs along the top, each tab representing one of the options of the previous screen.
The content of each tab is mainly a series of options that you can select or deselect, depending on your preferences.
Posting to your blog is as simple as selecting New Post, entering a Title and composing you post, followed by clicking on the Publish link. It really is that simple. There is no need for you to have any technical knowledge in order to start your own Blogger blog.
If you want to change the look and feel of your blog, using blogger, you can by clicking on the Template tab. Here you can add and remove page elements which can include things like links to other websites, or images. Adding a link, for example, is a case of selecting the edit button and typing the website address (URL) in to a text box. There is no need to know how to create an HTML anchor tag, so for the technically challenged, Blogger is an easy to use solution.
When you make a post, you can check the content of the post before publishing it by clicking on a preview button. Although this is a good way for you to check your writing for spelling and grammer, personally I found this a bit annoying because it would take you away from the post screen, therefore possibly needing several screen refreshes.
When you create a Blogger blog you will get a website address of http://myownblog.blogspot.com . What this means is that your blog is being hosted on a Google server and you, the blogger, have no control over the blog, other than the posts and links etc that you put on it. In recent times this has proved to be a major drawback with Blogger, because many people who have spent hours posting on their blogs have found that they are not there anymore. Blogger has decided, for whatever reason, to delete the blog.
Another major drawback is that because you have no control over what goes on the server, you cannot upload videos or ebooks to the server, and you are limited in the size of images that can be uploaded. For the Internet Marketer this is a major problem, as many people use ebooks etc to entice people to their blogs, websites, newsletters and marketing lists. So for these people, they have to find another way of providing these services.
It is a fairly straight forward procedure to have Blogger installed on your own hosting account. When you sign up, instead of entering a Blogger name, just scroll down and click on Advanced Blogger Setup. This shows a page where you can enter the FTP address and user name of your host account. When you click on continue and after selecting and entering a few other settings, the blog software will be uploaded to your website for you. No need to change any scripts or know anything technical.
If you have a bit of knowledge of HTML and CSS, then modifying the look of a Blogger blog can be done by selecting the Template tab followed by Edit HTML. As also the posts use the same template, you can make global (all pages) changes from here.
Another plus for Blogger is that you can create any number of accounts and have multiple blogs running at once, all for free.
Wordpress.com
Wordpress comes in two varieties too; one hosted on their servers and one as a script download that you can host on your own server. Lets have a quick look at the first option.
In a similar way to Blogger, you can set up a blog at Wordpress.com. This kind of wordpress blog is host on their servers, so you will be limited to just making posts. Any images, ebooks, or videos will nedd to be hosted elsewhere and linked from your wordpress blog.
As with Blogger, you get an easy to use dashboard type interface from which you can control the look and posts on your blog.
One of the features that I mentioned earlier about Blogger was it’s preview screen. Well with Wordpress, the preview is below the area that you are typing your post into, so there is no need to switch between screens, just scroll down and you can see how your post will look.
Using Wordpress from their servers you will get a web address similar to blogger, in that it will be something like http://yourblog.wordpress.com.
Of the two, for ease of getting started I personally would recommend Blogger, even setting it up on your own server is a breeze. But, for support and available “plug-ins” I would recommend you download the free Wordpress script from Wordpress.org.
Now most people would shy away from the word “script”, as that means programming to them. But the way the script has been written, it is extremely easy to do. The instructions are clear and it will take only a few minutes to do.
The only things that you need to be sure of is that the host you choose supports PHP (which most do) and MySql databases, again most do. If you are not sure how to set up a database, your host company will be able to help you.
Now, with the Wordpress script running on your own hosted website, you have complete control. The layout (or skin) of your blog can be easily changed and there are many third party templates available, many for free. These can be easily plugged into your software and away you go.
With your own server, you get to choose your own domain name (http://www.yourname.com) and you also have the ability to do other things like post video, cloak affiliate links, host your own products, the list is endless and all because you have spent a few dollars on a domain name and hosting. To me all that flexibility is worth it.
So in answer to the initial question, which blog software is the best, for pure flexibility it has to be an own hosted Wordpress blog.